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nextcloud
Merge duplicate contacts
In the old contacts you were able to consolidate or merge two contact entries into one.
Example how this could work:
- Alice is in the contact list twice
- select both contacts for Alice
- a “merge” button appears
- click on the “merge” button
- the two entries for Alice merge into one (if needed, user can be prompted regarding collisions)
This was particularly useful after importing contacts or syncing between several devices.
It would be great to have this option in the new contacts app as well.
As a bonus, a command to scan all your contacts for such duplicates and to consolidate them, would be awesome.
There is a $20 open bounty on this issue. Add to the bounty at Bountysource.
At the very least, it would be good if the vCard UID was respected and if an existing contact with the same UID was found, it will replace the attributes with the imported ones.
@Staja Could you open a separate feature request please? This is very different :)
As a temporary workaround, I have made a Python script to deduplicate entries in VCF export.
https://gitlab.com/Exagone313/dotfiles/-/blob/master/shell/pythonscript/vcf-dedup
Shit. Can we expand more on that?
@baimard and everyone else who liked his comment please for the sake of open source.
I don't speak for the Nextcloud project (I'm just a casual contributor every once in a while) but I encourage everyone here who thinks this functionality would be useful, or is extremely important, to contribute a pull request adding it.
7 years later and still don't have a BASIC yet extremely important feature. Sigh.
7 years later and still don't have a BASIC yet extremely important feature. Sigh.
No one is stopping you from writing the code. Or paying someone to write it.
I don't speak for the Nextcloud project (I'm just a casual contributor every once in a while) but I encourage everyone here who thinks this functionality would be useful, or is extremely important, to contribute a pull request adding it.
I haven't got the time, but I gave some money.
I gave some money
https://help.nextcloud.com/t/dont-use-bountysource-anymore/84943
There doesn't seem to be a new official bounty affiliate, is this true? I'm happy to add $ for this vital feature.
There doesn't seem to be a new official bounty affiliate, is this true? I'm happy to add $ for this vital feature.
Yeah... me too!
f
Thunderbird and CardBook plugin are good at this game
I tried this but it seems that it does not have this feature either. Or perhaps I am missing it. I can merge individual accounts but I would have to do it for all 300 duplicates myself. That is not really helpful.
Why is NC missing this very important thing. It is the third time I had to re-do all my contacts with some offline tool.
f
Thunderbird and CardBook plugin are good at this game
I tried this but it seems that it does not have this feature either. Or perhaps I am missing it. I can merge individual accounts but I would have to do it for all 300 duplicates myself. That is not really helpful.
Why is NC missing this very important thing. It is the third time I had to re-do all my contacts with some offline tool.
Which tool do you use?
In case someone wants to contribute this feature it would be nice, if one of the experienced developers could provide a hint where to start? Would it be better to provide a new app for that or add it as a feature to the existing contact app? Or is there a plugin API for the address book?
@ChristophWurst
Sure! I suggest to approach this in these steps
- [ ] Add multi select and bulk actions (as a start just add a bulk Delete action). You can use Mail as inspiration
- https://github.com/nextcloud/mail/
- [ ] Add a Merge action
- Ask the user which contact should be kept
- For any property that allows multiple values, combine the original values but discard duplicates
- For any properties with a single value ask the user which one of the two originals should be kept
It would be best to have this inside the app.
I would appreciate the feature described above very much. Let me suggest to think it in commong with contact deletion management (https://github.com/nextcloud/contacts/issues/296) to be able to undo unintended merges.
